"To remain ignorant of things that happened before you were born is to remain a child. What is human life worth unless it is incorporated into the lives of one's ancestors and set in a historical context?"
—Cicero (106-43 B.C.)
Dante named the damned and honored the virtuous. We continue this tradition. Some here may find redemption, but many will suffer this torment on earth: Our fiery blasts withering in a wide swath their ignorance and stupidity. Under this banner we proceed, "may the Lord see and avenge."
07 August 2006
Quote for the Day
"To remain ignorant of things that happened before you were born is to remain a child. What is human life worth unless it is incorporated into the lives of one's ancestors and set in a historical context?"
—Cicero (106-43 B.C.)
06 August 2006
Quote for the Day, part two
"The best laid schemes o' Mice an' Men,
Gang aft agley,
An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain
For promis'd joy."
Robert Burns
Nota Bene: Ben Stein puts it bluntly
How to Lose to Terrorists
by Ben Stein
Published 7/31/2006
We are in real serious trouble, and I'll tell you how and why I know it:
* Because the Hezbollah -- as has been well reported -- launches missiles at purely civilian targets in Israel as a matter of course, and no one in Europe or in the American left says "boo" about it. It's considered the Hezbollah's "right" to kill Israelis and when they do, they boast about it and promise to do more;
* Because it's been also well documented that the Hezbollah hides behind civilian targets and adjacent to civilian dwellings in Lebanon to fire its rockets at Israel, and when Israel fires back and mistakenly hits a home with civilians, the world of "intellectuals" and "thinkers" blames Israel and calls Israel bloodthirsty;
* Because when the Israelis kill civilians, they apologize, but when the terrorists kill civilians, they brag -- and the beautiful people scream at Eretz Israel and excuse the terrorists;
* Because if you substitute "America" for "Israel" and the "terrorists in Iraq" for the Hezbollah, you get what's happening in Iraq;
* Because it is impossible to beat a terrorist movement without using terror tactics, and we as a people of compassion and restraint, both in Israel and the U.S., will not use terror tactics even when survival is at stake, and this means we will not survive.It is very much as if, after Pearl Harbor, after the bombing of London, we said, "We will fight the Japanese and the Nazis, but we will only use humane means, and we will show total restraint and will never kill civilians. And we will search our souls and agonize about every move.
"It is this attitude that kept the United States from winning in Korea, in Vietnam, and now in Iraq. If we had followed that code of suicide, we would have lost World War II and the world would have been plunged into eternal darkness. You cannot fight inhumane people with humane means. You cannot fight savages with one hand -- no, two hands -- tied behind your back. No wars were ever won using restraint and only civilized means. That's a formula for complete defeat and for the end of civilized life. If we allow our media and French intellectuals to prevent us and the Israelis from using the means necessary to win, we'll lose...in Lebanon, in Iraq, and everywhere and this civilization is very well worth preserving. Yes, as sad as it would be to use terror tactics to win a war, it would be incomparably worse to lose. At the end of the war we win, there is light. At the end of the war we lose, there is the end.
Ben Stein is a writer, actor, economist, and lawyer living in Beverly Hills and Malibu. He also writes "Ben Stein's Diary" in every issue of The American Spectator.
Nota Bene: G.K. Chesterton's prophetic tale
From The American Spectator
The Flying Inn Reconsidered
By Hal G.P. Colebatch
Published 8/3/2006 12:07:46 AM
When I was a child going through my late father's library my maternal grandfather pointed out an old copy of G.K. Chesterton's The Flying Inn, published in 1914, and said: "That's a good story!" I wish now that Grandfather had lived long enough for me to talk to him about many things. I am not sure why he, Mayor, Member of Parliament, Knight, and general pillar of the community, with no sign I could detect of even my father's bohemian streak, thought this tale of rum-disbursing rapscallions in flight from the law was a good story, but I took him at his word and when I read it found he was right. It is also curiously prophetic.
It was condemned to many years of neglect, presumably because of what was then seen as the quaintness and irrelevance of its subject matter -- an Islamic attack on and infiltration of England. It has, however, recently been reissued in the U.S. by Dover publications.
It is, as one of its excellences, a swinging hit at political correctness, penned a couple of generations before the term political correctness was dreamed up. The British politician, Lord Ivywood, by a piece of legal trickery, bans the drinking of alcohol in England. That is, alcohol is not banned outright, but can only be sold by an inn displaying a sign, and the signs are banned.
The good people, like irresponsible vagabonds, travel the country just ahead of the law, first with a donkey and then a motor car, with a keg of rum and a cheese, as well as an inn-sign rescued from the destroyed inn "The Old Ship," dispersing cheer to the workmen who have been denied a drink, singing merry songs on the way (naturally most of the establishment figures who support prohibition still manage to evade it for themselves in other ways).
But there is more sinister parallel development. Targeting the traditional English pub is only part of the politically correct targeting of all English institutions, traditions and identity, enforced by a British establishment enthralled by Islamicism. We also hear little asides about the cross being gradually banned, or rather, replaced by a combined cross-and-crescent symbol ("The Crescent, the growing thing...the religion of progress"). Smart art circles adopt Islamicist art. Then there are growing hints of political preparations for polygamy, the institution of the harem and the suppression of women.
Anticipating what would be one of the characteristics of 20th century totalitarianism and 21st century relativism, history is rewritten to show that England was originally an Islamic country. The old pub name "The Saracen's Head," probably dating from some memory of the Crusades, is, so the people are told, really a corruption of "The Saracen Is Ahead." "The Green Man" (another traditional English pub name which is in fact probably a fossil reference to very ancient fertility beliefs) was actually, according to the new revisionists, a corruption of "The Agreeing Dragoman."
One might think this pseudo-history a flight of fantasy too far. But in 2004 the Mufti of Australia and New Zealand, Taj Al-Din Hamad Abdallah Al-Hilali, who has described the holocaust as a Zionist lie, also claimed that Australia was originally Islamic land, settled by Afghans. The Australian Aborigines were their descendants. (In fact Aborigines reached Australia several tens of thousands of years ago. Some so-called "Afghans" -- actually mostly Iranians - arrived in the 19th century to work as camel-drivers in the outback.)
This real-world Mufti claimed as evidence of the Aborigines' Muslim origins the facts that they "have customs such as circumcision, marriage ceremonies, respect for tribal elders, and burial of the dead -- all customs that show that they were connected to ancient Islamic culture before the Europeans set foot it Australia." This real-world rubbish actually surpasses the tortured rationalizations and historical revisionisms of the fictional Islamicists in The Flying Inn. Apparently no one told the Mufti that circumcision (actually many Aborigines practiced subincision, a very different thing) far predates Islam and is characteristically Jewish, and marriage ceremonies, respect for elders, and burial of the dead are features of practically every society.
The same claim has been advanced by some modern Islamic writers for America, including statements that Columbus found mosques there. (The point here is that Islamic law states Muslims possess by right any land that once formed part of the House of Islam. This is a key element in Islamic claims against the existence of Israel.)
As The Flying Inn goes on it gradually becomes apparent that Ivywood is working towards destroying the entire Christian and Western identity of England. As Catholic priest Addison H. Hart pointed out in a recent essay, while Ivywood is using Islamicism as a tool, he is also a creature of pseudo-Nietzscheanism. "I see the breaking of barriers," he says. "Beyond that I see nothing." They are words that could be straight from modern deconstructionism and they encapsulate its ultimately Hellish nature. Ivywood is, ultimately, the voice of Antichrist. His associates and tools, his "false prophets," are a strange little Turk, Misysra Ammon, and a miserable crawling journalist, Hibbs However.
Against Ivywood is an at first tiny resistance movement: a giant, red-haired, hard-drinking Irishman named Patrick Dalroy, a thoroughly English pub-owner named Humphrey Pump, dispossessed landlord of "The Old Ship," who loves Pickwick and has the history of the country in his bones, and Lord Ivywood's poet cousin, an aesthete who is, as a later generation would put it, mugged by reality. After many adventures the story concludes with England roused, a decisive battle against the Islamicist Army which Lord Ivywood has been secretly shipping in, and Dalroy getting the girl. Like Nietzsche, Lord Ivywood goes mad, babbling of the Superman in an asylum.
As with other books by Chesterton, when I first read it I was puzzled but liked it. Perhaps part of what appealed to me was its obviously fantastical nature. When Chesterton wrote it, on the eve of the First World War, the great perceived threat to England and to the "Western and Christian heritage" was not Islamicism, which had been out of such questions for centuries, but German militarism. When I read it, the Cold War had been on for all my life, and showed no signs of ending -- or at least not of ending in victory. The Flying Inn had nothing to do with such "present discontents." But it is in my mind yet, when those other things are gone.
Hal G.P. Colebatch is a lawyer and author and lectures part-time in legal studies at Notre Dame University in Western Australia. His book Blair's Britain was selected as a Book of the Year in the London Spectator.
The Flying Inn Reconsidered
By Hal G.P. Colebatch
Published 8/3/2006 12:07:46 AM
When I was a child going through my late father's library my maternal grandfather pointed out an old copy of G.K. Chesterton's The Flying Inn, published in 1914, and said: "That's a good story!" I wish now that Grandfather had lived long enough for me to talk to him about many things. I am not sure why he, Mayor, Member of Parliament, Knight, and general pillar of the community, with no sign I could detect of even my father's bohemian streak, thought this tale of rum-disbursing rapscallions in flight from the law was a good story, but I took him at his word and when I read it found he was right. It is also curiously prophetic.
It was condemned to many years of neglect, presumably because of what was then seen as the quaintness and irrelevance of its subject matter -- an Islamic attack on and infiltration of England. It has, however, recently been reissued in the U.S. by Dover publications.
It is, as one of its excellences, a swinging hit at political correctness, penned a couple of generations before the term political correctness was dreamed up. The British politician, Lord Ivywood, by a piece of legal trickery, bans the drinking of alcohol in England. That is, alcohol is not banned outright, but can only be sold by an inn displaying a sign, and the signs are banned.
The good people, like irresponsible vagabonds, travel the country just ahead of the law, first with a donkey and then a motor car, with a keg of rum and a cheese, as well as an inn-sign rescued from the destroyed inn "The Old Ship," dispersing cheer to the workmen who have been denied a drink, singing merry songs on the way (naturally most of the establishment figures who support prohibition still manage to evade it for themselves in other ways).
But there is more sinister parallel development. Targeting the traditional English pub is only part of the politically correct targeting of all English institutions, traditions and identity, enforced by a British establishment enthralled by Islamicism. We also hear little asides about the cross being gradually banned, or rather, replaced by a combined cross-and-crescent symbol ("The Crescent, the growing thing...the religion of progress"). Smart art circles adopt Islamicist art. Then there are growing hints of political preparations for polygamy, the institution of the harem and the suppression of women.
Anticipating what would be one of the characteristics of 20th century totalitarianism and 21st century relativism, history is rewritten to show that England was originally an Islamic country. The old pub name "The Saracen's Head," probably dating from some memory of the Crusades, is, so the people are told, really a corruption of "The Saracen Is Ahead." "The Green Man" (another traditional English pub name which is in fact probably a fossil reference to very ancient fertility beliefs) was actually, according to the new revisionists, a corruption of "The Agreeing Dragoman."
One might think this pseudo-history a flight of fantasy too far. But in 2004 the Mufti of Australia and New Zealand, Taj Al-Din Hamad Abdallah Al-Hilali, who has described the holocaust as a Zionist lie, also claimed that Australia was originally Islamic land, settled by Afghans. The Australian Aborigines were their descendants. (In fact Aborigines reached Australia several tens of thousands of years ago. Some so-called "Afghans" -- actually mostly Iranians - arrived in the 19th century to work as camel-drivers in the outback.)
This real-world Mufti claimed as evidence of the Aborigines' Muslim origins the facts that they "have customs such as circumcision, marriage ceremonies, respect for tribal elders, and burial of the dead -- all customs that show that they were connected to ancient Islamic culture before the Europeans set foot it Australia." This real-world rubbish actually surpasses the tortured rationalizations and historical revisionisms of the fictional Islamicists in The Flying Inn. Apparently no one told the Mufti that circumcision (actually many Aborigines practiced subincision, a very different thing) far predates Islam and is characteristically Jewish, and marriage ceremonies, respect for elders, and burial of the dead are features of practically every society.
The same claim has been advanced by some modern Islamic writers for America, including statements that Columbus found mosques there. (The point here is that Islamic law states Muslims possess by right any land that once formed part of the House of Islam. This is a key element in Islamic claims against the existence of Israel.)
As The Flying Inn goes on it gradually becomes apparent that Ivywood is working towards destroying the entire Christian and Western identity of England. As Catholic priest Addison H. Hart pointed out in a recent essay, while Ivywood is using Islamicism as a tool, he is also a creature of pseudo-Nietzscheanism. "I see the breaking of barriers," he says. "Beyond that I see nothing." They are words that could be straight from modern deconstructionism and they encapsulate its ultimately Hellish nature. Ivywood is, ultimately, the voice of Antichrist. His associates and tools, his "false prophets," are a strange little Turk, Misysra Ammon, and a miserable crawling journalist, Hibbs However.
Against Ivywood is an at first tiny resistance movement: a giant, red-haired, hard-drinking Irishman named Patrick Dalroy, a thoroughly English pub-owner named Humphrey Pump, dispossessed landlord of "The Old Ship," who loves Pickwick and has the history of the country in his bones, and Lord Ivywood's poet cousin, an aesthete who is, as a later generation would put it, mugged by reality. After many adventures the story concludes with England roused, a decisive battle against the Islamicist Army which Lord Ivywood has been secretly shipping in, and Dalroy getting the girl. Like Nietzsche, Lord Ivywood goes mad, babbling of the Superman in an asylum.
As with other books by Chesterton, when I first read it I was puzzled but liked it. Perhaps part of what appealed to me was its obviously fantastical nature. When Chesterton wrote it, on the eve of the First World War, the great perceived threat to England and to the "Western and Christian heritage" was not Islamicism, which had been out of such questions for centuries, but German militarism. When I read it, the Cold War had been on for all my life, and showed no signs of ending -- or at least not of ending in victory. The Flying Inn had nothing to do with such "present discontents." But it is in my mind yet, when those other things are gone.
Hal G.P. Colebatch is a lawyer and author and lectures part-time in legal studies at Notre Dame University in Western Australia. His book Blair's Britain was selected as a Book of the Year in the London Spectator.
Quote for the Day
A poem, in honour of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, born this day in 1809. He requested this poem be placed as a requiem, at the end of any collection of his poetry.
Crossing the Bar
Sunset and evening star,
And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar,
When I put out to sea,
But such a tide as moving seems asleep,
Too full for sound and foam,
When that which drew from out the boundless deep
Turns again home.
Twilight and evening bell,
And after that the dark!
And may there be no sadness of farewell,
When I embark;
For though from out our bourne of Time and Place
The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have crossed the bar.
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